Spring and All

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1923

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

Faith in the Resilience of Nature

It is a cliche: Spring brings hope. Even the most morose individual would be hard pressed not to affirm the magnificent resilience of nature in the boom days of spring with its gaudy spectacle of blossoms and leaf. Optimism in spring, however, is cheap and easy. Williams offers a more difficult premise: optimism in winter, a faith in the resilience of nature, faith despite rather than because of the evidence.

In those moments when nature appears dead, the speaker argues, it is only dormant, awaiting patiently the surging return of life. The poem celebrates faith in that resilience of nature. By positioning the speaker in a bleak late-winter wasteland world of dried and broken weeds, slushy brown puddles, and stark, bare bushes and trees, the poem makes all that more emphatic the faith in nature’s resilience. Its vitality, the speaker feels, surges in the very ground, life energy gripping that dead world by the roots and promising an imminent awakening.

Too much a doctor, Williams offers a tempered optimism by refusing to concede nature to death. A little sluggish perhaps, a bit dazed certainly, but nature will not accept the premise of its own exhaustion. The poem takes place just before the razzle-dazzle magic of spring begins to clarify itself. Such a gaudy show, the speaker suggests, only makes obvious what the speaker feels now: life will win out.

At this threshold moment, then, the resilience of nature is more an article of faith, a promissory note validated on by purplish and reddish stuff on tree branches and a thin hue of green in the grass. But tomorrow, the speaker affirms, tomorrow, one by one spring will return. Faith then animates the thematic argument of the poem. Heading to work at the hospital on yet another late winter morning, the speaker shakes out of the lethargy of the late season to offer the reassurance that nature will not forsake the spring, that the late winter world is lifeless only in “appearance” (Line 14).

The Unsuspected Beauty in the Unseemly

Springtime lends itself to thematic poetry, especially when witnessing the explosion of blossoms and leaves, the showy return of sunshine, and the cascading tunes of songbirds. Nature, resplendent in green, unleashes its finest show in the spring, as if to make up for the dreariness of winter. Who could not respond to such beauty, the poem asks readers with an anything-but-rhetorical question.

Williams, however, offers a subtler kind of winter beauty: winter-dead weeds, muddy fields, “twiggy” (Line 10) branches, faint patches of grass, a bitter wind, purplish buds on black bushes, cloudy skies, blue smudged with gray. It is the beauty of transition. Ignoring the winter and living in expectation of spring’s return denies winter its integrity and bankrupts it of its beauty, a beauty different from spring, certainly, but every bit as potent, every bit as revealing, and every bit as animated.

Do not be fooled by a landscape that seems dead, the poem suggests. The poem gives this world a moment of clarity, allows it to exist without ignoring it in favor of the fast-approaching theater of spring itself. The poem challenges readers to see the potential for beauty, to respond to the dynamics of expectation without settling into the doldrums, without conceding to the faux anxiety of perpetual winter. If the poem (and the reader) can exist in two tenses simultaneously, if the poem can be suspended between “is” and “will be,” the poem’s urgent optimism takes root much like the raw energy of spring jolts the roots of the plants and trees and begins the slow-motion resurrection of spring. The poem then suggests the unsuspected beauty of beginnings. The muddy fields and the scraggly bushes, the smeary blue skies and the scraggly line of bare trees offer an integrity all their own. They cannot be ignored in favor of spring. The poem celebrates the beautiful unsightliness of late winter.

The Role of the Poet

For all its obvious fascination with the winter world struggling toward spring, for all its careful detailing of that (un)promising environment in which spring is at best a promise, the poem doesn’t only celebrate the perpetual cycle of the seasons. Another gift offered in the poem is the speaker who, moving through an otherwise inauspicious landscape, reminds readers to see what is not obvious, to feel what is not evident, and to affirm what seems ironic. In the lingering power-grip of winter, the speaker intuits, is the beginning of spring.

In this, Williams gifts the speaker with an inspirational role that recalls the determined optimism of the voice heard in Walt Whitman’s most moving poems. Williams from an early age responded to Whitman’s sense of the spiritual dimension to the role of poet. The work of a poet is nothing less than offering readers a dazzling sense of hope in the spiritual reach of a world that is otherwise grimly materialistic. In the cycle of seasons, the world offers an illuminating affirmation of continuity, of the perpetual presence of hope, and the gift of sustained optimism. Without exploiting religious sensibility, Williams, taking a cue from Whitman, finds nature’s scrappy refusal to surrender to winter spiritual enough.

The poet, much like a doctor, cannot ignore reality but, much like a doctor, cannot abide the logic of surrendering to its darkest possibilities. In an era in which poets turned more inward and, taking a cue from the recently published confessional poetry of Emily Dickinson, promoted their darkest insecurities and emotional wounding as poetry while other poets, influenced by the titanic presence of Eliot’s Waste Land and enchanted by the caustic power of irony and satire, saw poetry as a way to critique the corruptions of Western civilization, Williams offers a different perspective on the role of the poet. Bringing together the spiritual urgencies of the ministry with the observational objectivity of the sciences and the generous roving eye of the painter, Williams fashions a kind of poet that finds in the everyday world all around us a rationale for hope and a logic for joy.